


I Wear the Dust From the Earth

by mytimehaspassed



Category: Savages (2012), Savages - All Media Types, Savages Series - Don Winslow
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 15:06:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/663392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mytimehaspassed/pseuds/mytimehaspassed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They come to Ben and Chon with an offer that’s only slightly more difficult to refuse than a root canal, and Chon warns Ben with a soft, warm whisper against the shell of his ear that none of the Mexicans, with their silver-handled guns and cowboy boots, should be considered as easy and light-hearted as they appear to be, especially from where Ben and Chon sit on the white, plush couch in Alex’ hotel room, plied with fruit and cheese and wine, and especially when Ben and Chon are so pleasantly buzzed, a faint whiff of their morning toke drifting from both of their clothes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Wear the Dust From the Earth

**I WEAR THE DUST FROM THE EARTH**  
SAVAGES  
Ben/O/Chon  
 **WARNINGS** : Sort of spoilers, but this is a complete and total AU; violence; murder.  
 **NOTES** : For elfie. :DDD

  
**1.**   


They come to Ben and Chon with an offer that’s only slightly more difficult to refuse than a root canal, and Chon warns Ben with a soft, warm whisper against the shell of his ear that none of the Mexicans, with their silver-handled guns and cowboy boots, should be considered as easy and light-hearted as they appear to be, especially from where Ben and Chon sit on the white, plush couch in Alex’ hotel room, plied with fruit and cheese and wine, and especially when Ben and Chon are so pleasantly buzzed, a faint whiff of their morning toke drifting from both of their clothes.

Ben smiles wide and charming, and Chon places his hand against his own hip, right where his gun used to be.

Alex tilts his head in a dangerous way, and Ben’s smile is tight now, stretched white across his face, and Alex throws a hand away from his body, casually, as if they are all old friends here, and says, “So you will think about it, yes?”

And Ben squeezes Chon’s thigh like a mother telling her son to be quiet, and says, “Of course.”

 

**2**.

They don’t think about it.

They think about handing them the business on a silver platter, they think about running, in that way that children do sometimes, and then O walks in with nothing more than a bikini top and jean shorts zipped all the way down, far enough that they can see the curve of her pelvic bone, and they think about sex and that heady rush of the blunt Ben’s just rolled and lit with his lucky lighter, blowing out the smoke from his mouth in delicate rings.

 

**3**.

Ben calls them the next afternoon, and he smiles when he says thank you, but no thank you. Ben has so many things that he still needs to do in his life, but Alex is welcome to take the shop that they have set up here, the modest gathering of customers, and make it their own. Walmart swallowing up the organic, independent competition, Ben says, and Chon is strung tight against him, his body unmoving.

Alex chuckles over the line, and Ben makes a “see?” face at Chon, his mouth curled down, his left eyebrow curled up, but Chon is unconvinced, deadly. Alex says something to someone else, someone far away, in Spanish, and Ben doesn’t quite catch it, but then his voice is back, strong and loud. “Very well, Mr. Leonard.”

And Alex says he’ll call again tomorrow to work out the plans.

 

**4**.

They go out to celebrate, Ben and Chon and O and the money that Ben flashes between them, licking his thumb and peeling back one hundred dollar bills like they’re going out of style. Ben kisses O in the space behind her ear, moving her hair with a thick, soft fist, and then pushes Chon jokingly when Chon steals her away, his hand on the small of her back scarred and warm. Chon smiles and brushes his lips against Ben’s cheekbone, his lips dry and chapped.

They have dinner and then they have sex and then they sit in bed and smoke from Ben’s bong, watching the white clouds curl up and up and up.

Ben kisses O softly, exploring her mouth with his tongue, and then pulls back to say, “Happy retirement.” His eyes crinkling when he smiles, his hair hanging in his face.

Chon rolls his eyes, but doesn’t say a word as he kisses his way down Ben’s abdomen.

 

**5**.

Ben goes to meet with Alex to discuss the terms and conditions of the friendly takeover.

He doesn’t come back.

 

**6**.

They catch him off guard.

Actually, they catch him with no guard, because they wait until Chon sets himself up in the spot that he had previously fleshed out, a little grassy hill with a straight line of sight to Alex’ hotel room, his rifle balanced flat against his cheek, watching Ben through the scope, watching him ride the elevator and then step into the room, his hair ablaze in the afternoon sun. It had taken them five minutes to find Chon, watch him watch Ben, whose wide smile turns into a panicked gaze towards the window as Alex levels his gun directly at Ben’s chest, takes them five minutes to find him, and even less to shoot Chon in both of his kneecaps.

Lado tells Ben this when they’re safely on the other side of the border.

He laughs when he says it, pulling a cigarette away from his mouth to let the smoke coat Ben’s red, wet face. They had given Ben a few bruises, a few close-fisted smacks to teach him submission, but Chon had laid on the grass for an hour, his cellphone smashed to tiny pieces, before somebody had seen him and called 911. Lado lifts his chin in Ben’s direction and twists his mouth in a cruel grin and says something about how Chon had broken the necks of both the shooters, had lifted with his big hands and twisted until bone snapped between his palms, and how Ben should be proud of his brother, this said with a sneer, because it’s not like Lado doesn’t know who Chon is to Ben, who Ben is to Chon.

Lado saying, “Your boy kills like a savage,” and Ben wipes his face with the sleeve of his shirt, his shoulders shaking, the chain attached to his leg rattling with the movement.

Lado blows more smoke into Ben’s face and smiles, his cologne wrapping heavily around Ben like a blanket, and Ben waits one minute, two, before he can’t hold the vomit back any longer.

 

**7**.

When he meets Elena La Reina, she’s dressed immaculately. Her dress is short and tight and her hair is long and straight and her nails are painted blood red, balanced on his chin as she turns his head to look at the bruise over his cheekbone, the bruise that curls around his swollen lip. She sighs and drops his face from her grip, but she gives only a frustrated look to Lado, who shrugs his shoulders and doesn’t apologize for the fingerprints he’s left on Ben’s skin.

She shows Ben the lab where he’s going to work, his station of expensive, high-end science equipment that would be put to better use filtering the water in an underdeveloped country, or set up in a government funded laboratory somewhere, where the technicians are paid to try and find the cure for cancer. She waves a hand at the white, sterile room and tells him that she hopes he’ll be very happy here.

 

**8**.

He gets one phone call to Chon and O.

Elena opens up Skype on the laptop that they bring in for him, and he dials the number for his computer at home and when he first sees O, he starts to cry. O presses her face close to the camera and she says his name fifteen times in the span of two minutes, and she’s sobbing behind her hands, and she tells him that she loves him and that she misses him and that she wants him back, and Ben cries and tells her the same, and then she blows a kiss from the palm of her hand, and when Ben asks to see Chon, she exits the screen and Chon takes her place.

“Hi,” Ben says, and his voice is hoarse.

“Hi,” Chon says, and his eyes are cold and hard, but his tone is infinitely warm, just for Ben. He’s hunched over, his arms cradling crutches, and Ben knows that if Chon were to point the camera down, his legs would be wrapped in gauze.

“How are you?” Ben asks, and it’s more than just a platitude, his arms wrapping around himself, his hands shaped into fists.

“Fine,” Chon says, clipped, and then he jerks his chin to Ben’s bruises. “How are you?”

“I’m okay, Chon.” Ben says, and Chon’s mouth quivers just once, just for a moment. “They want me here for a while, though, working for them. They want you to give them the names of all of our growers, of all of our business partners.”

“And all of our customers,” Chon says, and Ben nods. “All of our money, too?” And Chon’s voice is strained, unkind.

Ben looks to his left, where Elena is watching him with a pointed gaze, and she raises her eyebrows and Ben turns back to Chon and says, “They want me to tell you that if you don’t do everything they ask, they will kill me and then O and then you.” He looks back over to Elena. “In that order.”

Chon nods, “Okay. Then they get everything they want.”

Ben slides his eyes back to him and he says, “I love you,” his face wrinkled and swollen and warm, and that’s when Elena closes the laptop.

 

**9**.

Lado doesn’t hit Ben every day, but when he does, it’s with the back of his hand, open, his ring catching the side of Ben’s face, the corner of Ben’s eyebrow, splitting skin.

Ben doesn’t fight back.

 

**10**.

Ben creates super strains from the infinitely inferior product that they give him, and he smokes what he can, to test the outcome or calm his nerves, whatever he wants to call it. The boy they have watching him is small and brown, kind eyes, and Ben offers him some weed sometimes, just to be friendly, and the boy takes it from Ben’s hands and pulls in two, maybe three drawls, before he sits down on the couch with him for a marathon of Real Housewives.

Ben wishes that they would at least give him some quality TV to watch, some books to devour in the time that he sits around doing nothing, but Elena La Reina doesn’t answer his calls, except to send Lado, who Ben’s convinced must have some latent homosexual tendencies what with the amount of time he spends pressing his fists into Ben’s skin.

They let him check his emails and reply to Chon and O’s worried questions, reply to his parents’ long winded inquiries on what he’s doing now, where he is in the world, but the boy looks over every word before Ben’s allowed to click send, so he remains uselessly clipped and un-Ben-like.

O writes, “Come home soon.”

And Chon writes, “Kill them all.”

 

**11**.

Ben is, above all, a pacifist, but with the time spent rotting in the jail cell they keep him in at night, with the days passing in the lab like the slow crawl of an ocean, Ben catches himself thinking about the death of Lado. He imagines it cold and bloody, Chon-style, two taps of Chon’s handgun to the back of Lado’s head, his eyes going feral and then blank, like a light turned off.

He imagines it warm and wild, Lado scrabbling with Ben to survive, his nails and teeth and the knife he keeps in his boot slicing through Ben’s flesh, before Ben finally puts his palms around Lado’s neck, his thumbs pushing down on Lado’s Adam’s apple, squeezing and squeezing until there’s nothing left, Lado’s hyoid bone snapping beneath the brutal force.

He imagines Lado’s corpse, broken, bloody, laying lifeless underneath Ben’s foot.

And, at night by himself in the tiny, dirty bed, Ben cries about the loss of his Buddha more than anything else.

 

**12**.

He first hears the rumblings of a coup through Lado, who hits him so hard that Ben tastes blood in the back of his throat, thick and metallic. Lado curses something in Spanish, something about somebody with a Regan mask and a collection of RPGs and assault rifles hitting one of their store houses, and Ben immediately thinks of Chon, and his heart is hammering in his chest so loud that he thinks Lado must hear it.

Lado says, “That boy,” and gestures to somebody outside the room, and Ben suddenly can’t hear anything over the rush of his blood, like ocean waves pushing themselves forward and then back again, thinking Chon Chon Chon, but it’s only the boy that watches Ben at night, the one who gives him pizza and smokes with him sometimes.

Lado asks him if Ben has written anything about the store houses in any one of his emails, the names or locations of any of the grunts in Elena’s army, like Ben is privileged with this information, but the boy shakes his head, his brown skin pallid under the phosphorescents. Lado nods his head once, and waves a hand, dismissing the boy from his sight, but as soon as the boy turns, his shoulders drooping in relief, Lado pulls out his pistol and shoots him in the back of the head.

Ben’s learned to not cry anymore at the sight of blood curling around a crumpled, lifeless body.

 

**13**.

Elena dines with him once, the day after the initial store house hit, asking him to wear the oversized, expensive suit that they had brought down into the dank little room and tailored to fit his thin body. They push his hair back and give him a blindfold and he’s led to Elena’s house by Lado’s thick, strong grip, where they sit him down roughly and uncover his eyes.

The first thing he sees is Elena’s beautiful smile.

She’s simple, this time, elegant, and Ben can’t help but smile back, even if his mouth hurts to do so, the bruises that are part of his face now, layered densely on top of each other. He lays his hands on the table in front of him, his dirty, calloused hands on the pristine white tablecloth and Elena looks down at them for a moment, her nostrils flaring, her mouth a straight, white line, before she looks at him again.

“Mr. Leonard,” she says, her voice accented and light, betraying the power that she ultimately reigns. She spears a piece of steak from her plate with her fork and holds it up in between them, her mouth open. “I thought you would like a break from pizza.”

Ben looks down at his plate, the steak there, and then back up at her. “Thank you,” he says, and his voice is hoarse, and he can’t remember her ever being this nice before, in the few times that he’s seen her here, between the cell and the lab, between Lado and his bruising, biting fists. He feels warm inside, his cheeks burning from her attention, and he wonders, briefly, if this is how Stockholm syndrome is supposed to feel.

Elena bites another piece of steak and chews, thoughtfully, her gaze on him. “Tell me, Mr. Leonard,” she says. “How do you like it here?”

Ben has a knife in his hand, a sharp steak knife, and he thinks of using it to slit her throat, a wanton, gluttonous thought that never would have entered his mind three months ago, before he came to Mexico, before he met Alex and Lado and Elena Le Reina. “Well,” he says, fiddling with the handle. “It’s not the beach.”

Elena smiles, and it’s dangerous. “No,” she says. “I suppose it isn’t.”

“I guess it’s better than being dead,” Ben says, and Elena arches an eyebrow.

“I don’t expect you to take this as flattery, Mr. Leonard, but you’re worth a lot more to us alive than dead.” She takes a long sip from her wine glass, her neck one long, straight column. “Your friends, on the other hand.”

Ben’s heart starts pounding, fast and fluttery in his chest. He swallows down two long sips of the wine that was placed in front of him, his fingers thick and clumsy on the glass, and he spills a drop on his pants, a red dot that feels cool against his thigh. He thinks Chon, and he thinks O, and his palms feel sweaty, his head aches.

“You tell your brother to be a good little boy, now,” she says, her voice pointed. “No more unnecessary violence. Is that clear, Mr. Leonard?”

Ben is frozen for a minute, her eyes sharp, piercing right through him, before he nods, his hands shaking beneath him.

Elena smiles again, her lips painted red. “I’m glad we agree.”

She makes a gesture with her hand to someone out of his sight, and before he feels the large, strong hands on him again, before he feels the slither of the blindfold over his eyes, he tucks the steak knife up his sleeve.

 

**14**.

He gets Skype again this time, dialing the number to his computer frantically as Lado watches him from across the room, his crossed arms and cowboy boots. Chon answers, and he looks better this time, no crutches, his face surprised when he sees Ben.

“Chon,” Ben says, and it’s choked.

“Ben,” Chon says, pressing his face closer to camera. “Are you okay?”

“Chon,” Ben says again, and this time it’s a whisper, as he huddles against the screen of the laptop. “They know. They know, Chon.”

Chon freezes and goes blank, goes murderous, but doesn’t say anything.

“They told me to tell you that you need to behave.” Ben’s fingers are white on the laptop, straining. “You need to stop, Chon, please. They’ll kill you. They’ll kill O.”

“They’ll kill you,” Chon says, and it’s the same argument they’ve had, over and over again. The same argument about life and death and karma and the eternal reward, except Ben is really scared now, and he doesn’t want to die, and he doesn’t want anyone else to die, especially O, especially Chon. “I had to do something. I had to try.”

“I know,” Ben says, small, soft, and then he smiles, shakily. “Don’t worry about me.”

Chon says, “Impossible,” but when he smiles, it’s real, and Ben has time to tell him that he loves him, to tell him to tell O that he loves her, before Lado comes over to take the laptop from him.

Ben doesn’t even jump when Lado drops the laptop on the floor, hard, doesn’t even make a sound when the pieces scatter across the floor.

 

**15**.

Things are quiet for a few days.

Lado keeps his distance.

Ben is nothing if not relieved.

 

**16**.

The next hit is not a store house, but one of Ben’s own grow houses.

Lado pulls his belt through the loops of his jeans, but Ben pleads and cries that it wasn’t Chon, that it couldn’t be, because he would never do something that reckless, not when all of their necks are on the chopping block, and he cries Elena’s name over and over and over again, pleading with the all-seeing eye of the camera above.

Lado moves to the door, to speak with the soldiers on the other side, and, with one last look at Ben, curled on his knees on the floor, he closes the door behind him.

Ben lives through the night.

 

**17**.

The one after that is another store house, this one safely on the other side of the border, closer to Elena’s own mansion, where Ben is kept like a dog on a leash in the lab, locked inside all day with seeds and plants and the sterile white of the walls.

Elena gets worried this time, because she’s had eyes on Chon since the first store house, and he’s been going through the same California routine of surfing, tanning, and fucking O in Ben’s bed, like a good little boy, so she knows it’s not him. She questions Alex and she questions Lado and she puts two and two together and gets fucking one, one fucking snitch inside of the Baja cartel.

So she moves to America.

 

**18**.

They sneak Ben through the same way they snuck him across the first time, but at least they treat him to some burgers and fries on the other side, sitting in the empty parking lot of a McDonalds somewhere where there is nothing else except highway and highway and more highway, Ben dirty and sweating between the two men in the truck. He scoops out the ice chips from the large Coke they hand him with his unclean fingers and chews on them, his shoulders heavy under the sun.

They have another lab set up at the new place, this one even more equipped, and he thinks he must still be somewhere in California because the technicians they’ve hired, the ones who nurture the plants with him, are all blonde and tanned and have the same lax attitude that Ben’s used to, what with growing up in Laguna. They don’t talk to him except to tell him about the yield, don’t touch him except to pass the equipment back and forth, don’t look at him at all.

He’s a little less bruised now, a little steadier on his feet than in Mexico, but this will never be his home.

 

**19**.

He starts planning a couple days after they bring him over. Starts taking stock of the exits and of the faces that keep guard, starts remembering passcodes, starts looking over the shoulders of each of his lab technicians. He watches Elena like a hawk whenever she passes him, even though it’s rare, even though she never looks at him or speaks to him or acknowledges his presence.

He’s a ghost, a former version of himself, and he plans and he plans and he plans.

And, he guesses, so does Chon.

 

**20**.

There was a shoot-out.

Or something to that effect.

 

**21**.

Ben is holed up in the little cage that is his bedroom and he hears the gun shots, the sharp bursts of ammunition, the sickening crunch of bodies hitting the floor, and he cowers in the corner, behind his dirty little mattress. Lado comes first, his gun in his hand, and opens the cage, the keys rattling in his palm. He grabs Ben by his hair and drags him out, Ben scrabbling to take hold of something, scrabbling to get away, his nails sharp on Lado’s skin.

Lado lifts the gun in the air and brings the butt down on Ben’s forehead, and Ben collapses on the floor, dead weight, lights flashing before his eyes, blood blooming in his hair. Lado says something quick in Spanish, something deadly, and Ben can’t move, can’t get out of the way as Lado lifts his gun again and aims straight for Ben’s heart.

Ben says, “Please,” but it’s soundless, because his throat has stopped working and his lips can barely move, and he closes his eyes and thinks, this is it.

Thinks, love you, Chon, love you, O.

The sound of the gun is deafening in his ears.

 

**22**.

It was Chon who actually pulled the trigger first, Lado crumpling like an upended sack of potatoes, his neck broken from the bullet.

And it was Chon who had invaded Elena’s house with a group of ex-military survivors of the Iraq-Afghanistan war, the same ones who helped him rob and pillage from each of the store houses, from Ben’s own stash, and all of them wear camo uniforms and NVGs, and all of them are armed to the teeth with black market weapons bought off of the internet. The Baja cartel, for all their power and wealth, had fallen short where it really counted, and most of the ammunition spent actually paid off, with little casualties within Chon’s own crew.

Chon finds Ben and bends down to check that he’s okay, his gloved hand resting on Ben’s pale cheek, hovering over Ben’s pale lips, and he says his name once, twice, his voice quivering.

Ben opens his eyes, and he smiles one big, wide smile, just for Chon, before he finally passes out.

 

**23**.

The queen escapes.

Ben hears through the grapevine that she moved back to Mexico, started another arm of her cartel somewhere where they’ve never even heard Ben’s name, and he supposes that that’s only fair. He made peace with his Buddha, and he doesn’t wish her death, even with everything that she’s done to him, even with everything that was done in the name of commerce.

He supposes that, one day, she’ll get what’s coming to her, in the name of karma or some other belief in the cyclical nature of the universe.

(And, one day, she does.)

 

**24**.

Chon brings him back, brings him back to O, who wraps her arms around him tight, pressing kisses to his face and his neck and his lips, placing her mouth on each mottled bruise on his skin. She cries and he cries and she won’t let him go, not for a few minutes, and he thinks he could die here, happy, and Chon pushes him gently down onto the bed and tucks him in like a little kid, and O settles down on one side of him, warm and pliant, and Chon settles down on the other, and Ben sleeps for two days straight, sweating through most of his sheets.

When he wakes up, O kisses him again, kisses him deeper, and Chon snakes a hand around Ben’s chest, and they have sex, all of them, before O rolls over to pack Ben’s bong, the strong shit that Ben keeps in his drawer for special occasions, like a visit to his parent’s house or when Chon comes back from the war, scarred and uncommunicative.

O says, “Happy retirement,” her lips feather light on Ben’s skin, and Ben laughs until he starts to cry.

 

**25**.

They start over. 


End file.
